Killing Bono...and the hope in British cinema

Killing Bono isn’t supposed to be a horror film, but to my great luck it turned to be one. It is a British feature film that comes from the greedy hands (they spent like ten pounds on it, or at least it looks like they did) of Nick Hamm, the director of Godsend and the Hole (and some other hugely disappointing films), and stars Prince Caspian himself. Bono doesn’t die, so since you already know it, you don’t have to watch it.

It tells a story of two brothers trying to start a band at exactly the same time Bono starts his. They go to school together, hang out, but the older brother Neil is a jealous bastard, so he basically refuses to lick Bono’s ass and decides to become as musically distant from U2 as possible. Nobody agrees with him, because he refuses Bono’s ass, which leads his band to many failures. He moves to London with his younger talented brother, they meet some producers and agents on the way, sleep with hot chicks and do some drugs, but everything under rating 15. They do some kind of music that is basically loud, so while watching a film it seems enjoyable, but thinking about it now it’s just meh. The band doesn’t make massive success, which hugely disappoints Neil, and thus he decides to kill Bono. It is a spontaneous decision and he changes it after two minutes. So who really cares, I don’t know.

The problem with the film lies massively in its script and directing. Basically, British films usually have much lower budgets than the Hollywood ones, so when the only two good things we can get from them fail, the whole film seems much worse than a bad American film. Nick Hamm (there was Q&A; after the screening) seems to me to be just so full of himself he doesn’t even want to learn from his mistakes. Even though the acting in the film is really on high school play level and the shots are taken from unreasonable angles, he just doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. Worse than that, he seems to be completely proud of the effect. Bless him. The scriptwriter definitely did not know what genre he was making, so he was struggling between drama and comedy, and then comedy drama, but in the end it's neither. The jokes weren’t funny, the references were pretty lame and these two combined with horrible acting created simply an embarrassing image. Trying to provoke so many laughs (and constantly failing in it), the script makes drama scenes weaker, because we simply don’t know what reaction it is trying to get from us. If it was good, it would probably result in a bitter sweet story. It’s bad, so it results in an annoying one.

I went to see it with an open mind (and hope that Bono gets killed at the end), without actually reading any reviews of it or even seeing the trailer beforehand. I exited the cinema pissed with people who invest in this kind of film. They are unnecessary, annoying and badly made. I hope for the sequel. I hope it will be called Killing Nick Hamm.